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The Turn Away From the Turntable
By SIMON REYNOLDS
N the first months of 2005, two of electronic dance music's biggest bands will release what are generally referred to as long-awaited albums. But what's uncertain is how many people are actually waiting to greet the Chemical Brothers' "Push the Button," out this week, or Daft Punk's "Human After All," due in March. If the humiliatingly lukewarm response to last fall's comeback albums by the top dance acts the Prodigy and Fatboy Slim is any measure, neither Daft Punk nor the Chemical Brothers ought to bank on teeming throngs at the record stores or a warm radio welcome.
During the halcyon days of the late 90's, these groups were the Big Four of crossover electronica, their music fusing techno's pounding machine rhythms with anthemic hooks and hard riffs that worked as well on rock radio as they did on the dance floor. The Prodigy's success eclipsed everybody else's ("The Fat of the Land" sold nearly three million copies in America alone), but Daft Punk and Chemical Brothers enjoyed MTV hits ("Da Funk" and "Setting Sun," respectively), while tracks by Fatboy Slim achieved ubiquity via movie soundtracks and TV commercials.
In those days, electronica was so trendy that Madonna jumped on two different techno bandwagons in swift succession, assimilating the euphoric riffs of trance with "Ray of Light" and aping the spangly effervescence of French house on "Music." The bullish mood in the electronic community back then was typified by Paul Oakenfold, the British superstar D.J., who tried to break his moistly emotional brand of trance in America, in the belief that this country was set to be dance music's next big commercial frontier.
Quite the opposite happened. In the new millennium, the mainstream profile of dance music dipped alarmingly. This downturn occurred on both sides of the Atlantic, but it was particularly precipitous in America, where electronica was edged off of the charts by the twin juggernauts of nu-metal and pop-punk, along with the perennial might of hip-hop. But it wasn't just a case of mass-media gatekeepers abandoning electronic music. Something was ailing at the grass roots of the scene. Formerly packed superclubs began to close, or move to smaller venues. Large raves, once the mainstay of dance culture, became nearly extinct. "Rave is dead in the Los Angeles area," says the West Coast scene watcher Dennis Romero, who is news editor at the dance magazine BPM.
As recently as 2001, Southern California was still the most vibrant rave scene in America, but according to Mr. Romero, the kids just aren't coming out to big events anymore, partly because of Ecstasy burnout. "The superclubs here are starting to see diminishing numbers as well," Mr. Romero says, "with popular nights like Spundae taking a hiatus and Red closing down altogether."
Not only were sales of crossover-oriented electronica plummeting; the underground dance music sold in specialist record stores also declined. Some of those shops have closed because business is slow and record labels are suffering. "People I know who run labels keep getting worse and worse news," says William Linn, a San Francisco-based dance party promoter. "Partly it's because of the Internet, people just taking the music for free. But it's also because people aren't buying the stuff in the way they were when the music was a really new thing back in the early 90's." During that rave culture heyday, an underground anthem could sell anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 copies. Today, shifting a thousand copies of a 12-inch single is considered a good result.
What happened? One cause is the continued fragmentation of dance culture into myriad micro-genres with narrow aesthetic parameters and niche followings. Another factor is musical overproduction, which effectively divides the pie into smaller slices. But the overall pie also seems to be shrinking as well. Dance music has simply lost the ear of the floating consumer. This may be, in part, a matter of fashion: electronic dance music had been around long enough to lose its "new kid on the subcultural block" status. The music had become familiar, and familiarity bred ennui.
Other genres have certainly suffered this kind of problem; dance music is going through the kind of midlife crisis that afflicts any genre that's been around a while (think rock music in the 1980's). "We're just waiting for the next Big New Thing in dance music to come along," says Norman Cook, the man behind Fatboy Slim. "Right now we're between New Things, and no one quite knows what the next one will be."
The central idea of electronic music's unwritten manifesto was always to surge full-tilt into the future. But in recent years many creators of dance music have been investigating the genre's own history, reworking ideas from electro, synthpop and Italodisco. Even more oddly, others have been looking to rock music for reinvigoration. Mr. Cook's "Palookaville" used rock instrumentation (guitar and bass) and more conventional verse/chorus song structures. Last year's biggest dancefloor anthem was Alter Ego's "Rocker," whose simple, chugging rhythm and squealing riffs are transparently modeled on heavy metal. Swaths of Daft Punk's new album, "Human After All," resemble an electronicized version of hard rock. Two highly touted early 2005 albums, the self-titled debut from LCD Soundsystem and Mu's "Out of Breach," have a rough-hewn, "live" garage punk feel to much of their contents.
Other currently hot outfits like Black Strobe, Tiefschwarz and Kiki hark back to 80's alternative rock genres like Goth and industrial. Kiki's "End of the World," for instance, features the Finnish-born producer paying vocal homage to the doomy, hollow-drone baritone of Andrew Eldritch of the goth-rock gods Sisters of Mercy. Perhaps the most bizarre example of dance music ransacking rock's archives was last year's fad for schaffel (German for shuffle), which involved producers renovating the stomping rhythms of 70's glam rock artists like T. Rex and Gary Glitter. It's hard to say whether all these different forms of rockified techno represent a subconscious attempt by the scene to ingratiate its way back into the mainstream, or are simply a case of producers looking for genre-crossing thrills. But none of them exactly restake dance music's claim as the music of the future.
Alongside its commitment to constant innovation, another central tenet of dance culture was the idea of being underground, an outlaw scene. In the early days, dance culture was oriented around one-off raves in unusual locations, often involving organizers breaking into warehouses or invading outdoor spaces. Proper safety codes were rarely observed, drugs were rife and the behavior of the participants verged on anarchy. Gradually, the thrills and dangers of raves were replaced by the more reliable pleasures offered by superclubs - organized by professionals and regularly scheduled but still fairly wild in terms of drug-fueled hedonism.
Today, the action is mostly in small clubs - like APT (419 West 13th Street) and Ikon (610 West 56th Street) in Manhattan - in some cases barely more than glorified bars. There, the audience exudes a clean-cut, metrosexual aura. At times it feels as if the room has been teleported to a chic bar in Barcelona or Berlin, especially as, more often than not, the D.J. is from Europe. Germany, in particular, is the spiritual homeland for American dance hipsters these days. Most of the leading labels - Kompakt, B-Pitch Control, Playhouse, Get Physical - are based there. In fact, some North American D.J.'s and producers like Richie Hawtin have moved to Germany because the climate for electronic music is more supportive.
If neither sonic futurism nor underground edginess apply any longer, electronic dance music's remaining raison d'être is, well, dancing. But in recent years it may have been beaten on the shake-your-booty front by dancehall and Southern rap. In response, some dance producers have started to draw upon raucously vibrant "street" beats: crunk, Miami bass, dancehall, grime and so forth.
The result is a growing hybrid genre, highlighted on the recent, excellent compilation "Shockout," known as "breakcore." Purveyed by artists like DJ/Rupture and Teamshadetek, the music combines rumbling basslines, fidgety beats and grainy ragga vocals to create a home-listening surrogate for the "bashment" vibe of a Jamaican sound system party. Others within the breakcore genre, like Knifehandchop, Kid 606 and Soundmurderer, hark back to rave's own early days, their music evoking the rowdy fervor of a time when huge crowds flailed their limbs to a barrage of abstract noise and convulsive rhythm. It's a poignant aural mirage of a time when techno music was made for the popular vanguard rather than a connoisseurial elite, as it is today.
Today's sharpest contemporary dance music operators, like Tiefschwarz or LCD Soundsystem, are roughly equivalent to recombinant rock auteurs of the 90's like PJ Harvey and Pavement, who generated sounds that weren't strictly innovative but managed to somehow feel original. Tiefschwarz's brothers-in-production duo Ali and Basti Schwarz and LCD's James Murphy have an almost scholarly knowledge of dance music history. They're adept at getting period sounds, but they combine them in fresh ways.
On LCD's album and Tiefschwarz's superb remix collection "Misch Masch," we don't really encounter the shock of the new; instead we get the frisson of novelty, subtle twists and cunning permutations within an established form. Which will have to be enough for now, until dance music producers once again figure out how to smack listeners upside the head with sonic strangeness.
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Me and my friends are like the drums on Lust for Life.
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